IBM is
currently putting together database and barcode tracking to allow farmers and grocers in China to track your porkchop, from the pig to the plate. Using supply chain tracking (similar to what is done already in other industries), the goal is to limit and hopefully prevent disease outbreaks by tracking the health of the animal, including which other animals it has come into contact with. So the next time you sit down for some nice ham, you might be able to scan the barcode (or RFID tag) to see whom else on your block shares your own porcine six degrees of separation.
[more inside]
posted by Old'n'Busted
on Dec 19, 2011 -
21 comments
A new malaria vaccine has been shown effective in large-scale field trials. After decades of disappointment, researchers think they're finally on track to unleash the first practical vaccine against malaria, one of mankind's ancient scourges.
In the world's first large field trial of an experimental malaria vaccine, several thousand young children who got three doses had about 55 percent less risk of getting the disease over a year than those who got a control vaccine against rabies or meningitis. [more inside]
posted by BobbyVan
on Oct 18, 2011 -
21 comments
How did
hookworm infections slow the economy of the postbellum South? Do
body mites play a role in diseases such as rosacea? Did
fermenting seal flippers in Tupperware instead of traditional containers increase Native Alaskan botulism rates?
Body Horrors is the blog of microbiologist Rebecca Kreston, who aims to explore the intersection of infectious diseases, the human body, public health and anthropology.
posted by emjaybee
on Sep 24, 2011 -
36 comments
India's vultures are vanishing. Populations of three species on the sub-continent have plummeted since the 1980s from 50 million to less than 60,000. Their disappearance could lead to widespread increase in human diseases.
posted by binturong
on Jul 5, 2011 -
24 comments
An NIH clinical trial
has shown that early treatment of HIV with antiretroviral drugs reduces the odds of the virus being transmitted to an uninfected sexual partner by 96%, with only one new HIV case recorded out of the 1,763 couples participating in the trial.
posted by schmod
on May 12, 2011 -
31 comments
The Burns Archive is a collection of over 700,000 historical photographs that document
disturbing subject matter: obsolete medical practices and experiments, death, disease, disasters, crime, revolutions, riots and war. Newsweek posted a
select gallery this past October, as well as a
video interview and walk-through with curator and collector Dr. Stanley B. Burns, a New York opthalmologist.
(Via) (Content at links may be disturbing to some.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 26, 2011 -
15 comments
Wake Forest University's slogan for their baseball team in 2011 is
'What are you willing to sacrifice to help make this team better?' "Head coach Tom Walter's intent was to have his players thinking about sacrifice bunts, moving runners over, and giving up personal glory to help the Demon Deacons improve as a team. But what Walter chose to sacrifice is greater than simply hanging in on a curve ball and taking one for the team.
Walter gave up a kidney."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 13, 2011 -
6 comments
Burial & Flight I BEGAN THIS SERIES TEN YEARS AGO in rural Kenya. When I started photographing, I thought I was working on a localized story about how HIV was destroying African society. Over the years, as I broadened my travels to China and Mexico, I began to see similarities in the composition of villages wherever I went. Only later did I fully realize that the quiet moments I documented in the African bush, Mexican plains, and majestic Chinese mountains represented small pieces of a great shift.
posted by metagnathous
on Dec 17, 2010 -
5 comments
The UN's FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) have announced that they believe rinderpest, an frequently fatal viral disease that affects livestock and wild ruminants, to have been eliminated. This is only the second virus, after smallpox, to have been wiped out.
The BBC and
the Guardian discuss the story in brief, and
Science has a slightly more in-depth look at it. The FAO themselves have put up an
interesting history of the disease and its treatment.
posted by Dim Siawns
on Oct 15, 2010 -
17 comments
"Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is an extremely rare disease of the connective tissue. A mutation of the body's repair mechanism causes fibrous tissue (including muscle, tendon, and ligament) to be ossified when damaged. In many cases, injuries can cause joints to become permanently frozen in place. Surgical removal of the extra bone growths has been shown to cause the body to "repair" the affected area with more bone."
^ Detailed in an article from The Atlantic, February 1998. Part
1. Part
2.
[more inside]
posted by vapidave
on Apr 7, 2010 -
18 comments
With 12-year old Maggie Wiederholt's permission, Quad City Times reporter Kay Luna and photographer John Schultz followed her and her family for several weeks as the terminally ill Walcott, Iowa girl faced death - and made choices about how to live.
Maggie's Choice is a heart-wrenching project that captures the last days of a young girl with with a rare form of Behcet's disease.
[more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski
on Apr 6, 2010 -
33 comments
About a hundred years ago, public health took a visual turn. In an era of devastating epidemic and endemic infectious disease, health professionals began to organize coordinated campaigns that sought to mobilize public action through eye-catching wall posters, illustrated pamphlets, motion pictures, and glass slide projections.
An Iconography of Contagion.
posted by Fuzzy Monster
on Feb 28, 2010 -
18 comments
War Dances:
“I wanted to call my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful”. Sherman Alexie doing his thing in The New Yorker, excerpted from his upcoming book (
early review; interview
1,
2.)
posted by Non Prosequitur
on Oct 5, 2009 -
45 comments
Polio: A Virus’ Struggle is a Graphic Novella by James Weldon.
When we eradicate a disease, do we ever think about how it may effect the disease?
Learn all about the history of Poliomyelitis, as he tells his story to the group.
posted by vertigo25
on Apr 12, 2009 -
16 comments
New Scientist:
What if we could rid the world of AIDS? The notion might sound like fantasy: HIV infection has no cure and no vaccine, after all. Yet there is a way to completely wipe it out - at least in theory. What's more, it would take only existing medical technology to do the job.
[more inside]
posted by andoatnp
on Feb 21, 2009 -
49 comments
Addiction: thousands of studies have been done claiming that it is a
disease, often using rats in isolated cages with a bar-press system of delivery, showing they will repeatedly get high even if it means starving to death. Bruce Alexander was a skeptic, questioning the ecological validity of all such results: "They were said to prove that these kinds of dope are irresistible, and that’s it, that’s the end of the addiction story right there," and after delivering one particularly fruitless seminar in 1976, he decided to build
Rat Park to conduct his own studies...
[more inside]
posted by tybeet
on Feb 12, 2009 -
47 comments
Imagine if you were the only person on earth; if no one else could understand you except yourself. No matter how hard you tried, you could never make contact with the outside world, not for long at least. This is the life of a
Schizophrenic.
Here, in a simulation created to understand what a typical trip to the pharmacy is for a patient suffering from Schizophrenia [
previously], you will experience for a few minutes what life is all about for people afflicted with this disease.
(via) [more inside]
posted by hadjiboy
on Sep 11, 2008 -
53 comments
While many ailments are considered terrifying,
Lesch-Nyhan is the stuff of nightmares. An extremely rare genetic neurological disorder with no cure, it often compels its victims to self-mutilate, even when they understand that doing so causes them harm.
Richard Preston used Lesch-Nyhan as a plot device in his best-selling thriller
The Cobra Event, and went on to write a fascinating article about the disease, its sufferers, and its implications for human behavior in the
New Yorker. [PDF].
[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Jun 5, 2008 -
35 comments
The Boneyard.
I’ve come to bear witness to American folly, to rest my eyes on the flying machines that flattened the forests of Southeast Asia, poisoned its people, and changed my life. A personal essay about the long-reaching effects of Agent Orange.
[more inside]
posted by amyms
on Apr 5, 2008 -
14 comments
